Consumer Expenditure Survey Family-Level Extracts -- 1980:1 - 2003:2

This page contains the NBER collection of
the
Consumer Expenditure Survey.
The
Consumer Expenditure Survey, done by the
Census Bureau for the
Bureau of Labor Statistics,
collects information from the Nation's households and families on their
buying habits (expenditures), income, and characteristics. The strength
of the survey is that it allows data users to relate the expenditures and
income of consumers to the characteristics of those consumers.
The survey consists of two components, a quarterly Interview Survey and a weekly
Diary Survey, each with its own questionnaire and sample.
The extracts of the quarterly Interview Survey, initiated by John Sabelhaus
and continued by Ed Harris of the Congressional Budget Office,
make access to data much more straightforward.

The family records data contain consumer unit information on expenditures,
income, wealth, and basic household demographics. The member record data contains
additional consumer unit member earnings and demographic information.

1985 Q3 and Q4 and 1995 Q3 and Q4 are not available due to a change in the
sampling frame.

For each household, the four quarterly records have been merged into an annual
record. For example, the 1997:1 files contain the annual expenditures for
households that began the survey 1997:1
and combines expenditures reported from 1997:1 - 1997:4.
None of the newid variables will match across quarters because each quarter is
a completely different sample.

Both ".Z" and ".zip" files can be uncompressed with winzip.
In addition, ".Z" files can be uncompressed using the UNIX uncompress
command and ".zip" files can be unzipped with uncompression software.
To check your ability to uncompress these files, download the small files
compress.Z or compress.zip.
These files give an example of how to read in .Z and .zip ASCII files into SAS for UNIX
without decompressing the files.
To download files in Internet Explorer, right click on them and select "Save Target As...".
If the pdf documents appear to be all blank pages, get the latest Acrobat
Reader at www.abobe.com.

The file size for the family files is about 300 Kb compressed, 3 Mb uncompressed. The
size of the member files is about 300 Kb compressed, 1.5 Mb uncompressed. The compression
ratio is over 90%.
Documentation, family records, member records, and FORTRAN source code is available
below.
The source data
used to create the extracts is available only from the BLS.

Internal users can access this data in a UNIX shell at /homes/data/ces_cbo
or on an NBER PC via Network Neighborhood --> NBER --> home --> data --> ces_cbo